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Shadowplay, by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, commissioned by the Christic Institute and published by Eclipse Comics in Brought To Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals and Covert Action (1988)

Following my feature on Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, I’ve been posting edited highlights from the 30,000-word interview transcript. Yesterday, Moore talked about his dealings with Anonymous and Occupy. This week, he addresses the conspiracy theories that the CIA or similar government-backed initiative were somehow involved in 9/11.

As Moore did a ton of research to write his half of Brought to Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action in 1988, you might expect him to have a point of view, and he doesn’t disappoint: “If you know there’s a fox in the neighbourhood, you just leave the hen house door open…”

Alan Moore: “Do I think that actually planting explosives on every level of the World Trade Center, was it a controlled demolition? I know about the Bush administration, and they are nowhere near clever enough to do anything like that – they would have screwed it up. But they wouldn’t have to. All you have to do is, if you know there’s a fox in the neighbourhood, you just leave the hen house door open. It doesn’t really require a conspiracy, but just a ‘moment’s carelessness’.

“What had happened in the case of America, as far as I can see, is Bush got in in 2000; almost as soon as he was in office, Rumsfeld – who had been secretary of state under George H W Bush – I think as soon as Bush was in, Rumsfeld stood down the simulation, the training simulation of blocking terrorists from flying a passenger plane into the World Trade Center… that simulation was stood down.

“He also changed the rules of aerial engagement over America, this was in 2000. If what happened on 9/11 happened a year before, they would have been blown out of the sky before they got anywhere near the WTC – but Rumsfeld changed the rules of engagement.

“What I’m saying is, it was in the Project for the New American Century’s interests for that to happen [the PNAC was a neo-con think tank on foreign policy]. Rumsfeld had actually written a paper before for the Project for a New American Century where it said that in order for America to pursue its objectives freely in the new century, what they would need to get approval would be a massive, catastrophic, catalysing event – like Pearl Harbour. George Bush’s diary on 9/11 said, ‘today, a new Pearl Harbour happened’.

“A massive, catalysing catastrophic event that would get public opinion behind America so that America could kind of go on the rampage and sort out things that the Bush family really wanted sorting out… Saddam Hussein… it’s not that they wanted Iraq’s oil, they just wanted him to stop pissing about with the oil price lever. Because what he would do is say ‘in support of my Palestinian brothers, I’m not going to release any oil’. And then he would say, ‘in support of something else, I’m going to release the full extent of oil’, which was sending the oil prices completely nuts – nobody could predict what was going to happen next week, that’s why they had to get rid of him.

“I mean, America had originally put him in place. He was originally a hitman that America had employed to try and assassinate the head of Iraq back in the ‘50s. It failed, and Saddam Hussein was presumably employed in other means for a number of years until 1971, when we parachuted him in, mainly because of the Iranian revolution. We needed somebody to keep an eye on those Iranians, so we put Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq.

“I’m not arguing for brilliant supervillains, plotting all of our lives. I’m arguing almost the exact opposite – complete incompetence. They think they are supervillains, they are sitting there stroking their white cats in their swivel chairs, and they’re all cretins.

“Because of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which is the fact that if you take a poll, and ask people to rate their own intelligence, average or above average. About 80 percent are above average. What this says is that we overestimate our own intelligence wildly. We can’t imagine anything much cleverer than we are. So we assume that we must be right at the top of the spectrum. We can imagine all the people who are more stupid than us, but we haven’t got enough imagination to imagine anything cleverer than us.

“I think that these are interesting times. They might be terminal times. I really hope not – I have grandchildren. We are at quite a delicate point here, though. The stakes have never been higher than this.”

Jerusalem is out now in hardback from Knockabout in the UK and Liveright in the US. For the full interview feature,click here. In interview extract #10, Alan Moore explains how he realised that time is not at all as we perceive it, and Doctor Manhattan was right.